Gustave Doré (1832-83) was the most popular
illustrator of all time, both in terms of number of engravings
(10,000+) and number of editions (4,000+). In the forty year
period from 1860-1900 a new Doré illustrated edition was
published every eight days! His 238 Bible engravings were by far
the most popular set of illustrations ever done, with nearly
1,000 editions. Yet Doré was much more than just an illustrator.
He did over 400 oil paintings. Millions of people came to see a
gallery of his paintings. He also did several hundred watercolor
landscapes and dozens of works of sculpture. He did the monument
to Alexandre Dumas that sits in Paris today.

Why then have so many people never heard of
Gustave Doré? They may not be familiar with his name, but his
engravings are everywhere, like on the cover of Time Magazine.
Doré is also one of the best kept secrets in Hollywood. His
engravings were used in many classic films like King Kong, Great
Expectations, and The Ten Commandments, as well as many recent
films like Amistat, Seven & What Dreams may Come. Doré's
name may fade in and out of pop culture usage, but his art has
had an enduring influence to generations of romantics and
realists alike.

Gustave Doré was born in Strasbourg in
January 1832. He was the ultimate child prodigy. His earliest
dated drawings were from the age of five. The stories of his
early artistic prowess are legendary. By the age of 12 he was
carving his own lithographic stones, making sets of engravings
with stories to go with them. The great French illustrator J.
J.Grandville met Gustave and predicted great artistic success.
But no one could have dreamed just how quickly that success would
come.

Doré exploded onto the Parisian art scene
at the age of 15, even though he was short and looked about ten
years old. The Doré family visited Paris for the first time when
Gustave was 15 and he fell in love with that capital of artistic
sophistication. One day they went by a publishing company, with a
set of engravings displayed in the window. Gustave immediately
hatched a plan. The next morning he feigned illness and told the
family to go on without him. He quickly made several sketches and
headed for that publishing company. He walked in the front door,
found the office of the publisher Charles Philipon, and barged
right in. He plopped his drawings down on Philipon's desk and
exclaimed, "This is how that set of illustrations should be
done." Philipon was amused at Gustave's antics, but when he
looked down at the drawings he almost cried. He called several
other people into his office. No one could believe that little
boy had actually done the drawings. So they asked him to do some
more drawings right there. He did additional drawings in
literally seconds. A collective gasp went up from the group. At
this point Philipon refused to let Gustave leave his office. They
tracked down Gustave's father and brought him to Philipon. They
talked him into signing a lucrative contract for Gustave on the
spot. Since the Dorés were headed back home, little Gustave
moved in with Monsieur Philipon.

By the age of 16, Gustave Doré was the
highest paid illustrator in France, making more per page than
Honore Daumier made at the height of his career. The timing of it
all was almost supernatural. Philipon was just launching a new
humor weekly, Journal pour Rire. Doré, the "Boy
Genius" (as Theophile Gautier dubbed him) was the featured
artist. But even prior to that, Philipon published Doré's first
book when he was just 15. It was a satire entitled The Labours of
Hercules. The 1847 book is now extremely rare. The book was
entirely by Gustave, who wrote the text, did the drawings &
engraved them all on stone. Little Gustave became the toast of
Paris.

By the way,
did I mention that he never had an art lesson in his entire life?

As a teenager, Doré did over 2,000
satirical caricature engravings. But he longed for more. In 1854,
he launched out into the field of literary engravings, with sets
for Rabelais and Balzac. During the 1850s he did dozens of
literary works, but once again he longed for more. Then he took a
step almost as bold as the steps he took in 1847 into Philipon's
office. By this time Doré was with the leading French publisher
Hachette. Doré told Louis Hachette he wanted to do the ultimate
art book, a giant literary folio of Dante's Inferno. Up to this
time no Doré book had retailed for more than 15 French Francs.
The proposed Inferno volume would sell for 100 Francs. Hachette
turned him down, saying no one would pay that much. Doré said he
would pay for the entire edition. Hachette was listed as the
publisher but was actually just the
printer. But again Hachette
cautioned Doré to only have a hundred copies bound, so as not to
waste all that money on binding. Doré did 76 full-page folio
engravngs for the elephant folio edition. It came out in early
1861. A couple weeks later, Doré received a famous telegram from
Hachette. "Success! Come quickly! I am an ass!" Far
from selling 100 copies, there have now been over 200 editions of
that set of engravings. The horror genre as we know it today has
two major sources - the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and the
engravings of Doré for Dante's Inferno. The early 1860s
solidified Doré's position as France's foremost illustrator.

A
series of childrens'
classics folios followed, from Don Quixote to Baron Munchausen to
Fairy Tales. But Doré was still relatively unknown outside of
France. All that would change in December of 1865. In a three
year period, the English-speaking world saw twenty Doré folios
containing over 2000 engravings. There were fears he would kill
himself from overwork. For nearly twenty years Doré would be
literally the most famous artist in the world. It was often said
that you c ould find Doré folios in every English-speaking home
where they could spell the word "art."

But we are getting ahead of our story. In
December of 1865, four Doré folios were published in England.
Shortly thereafter they began a serial of the Doré Bible, so
famous it's mentioned on page 46 of Tom Sawyer. British
commissions soon followed of Milton and Tennyson. The main
British publisher was Cassell, but by the late 1860s Doré folios
were published in dozens of languages.

Doré greatly benefitted from another
coincidence. It was at this time that electrotypes came into
widespread use, allowing unlimited reproduction of engravings
thru the use of molds. Foreign publishers only needed
electrotypes of Doré's engravings from his original French
publishers.

Doré moved into the field of Fine Arts in
the late 1860s, but first let us finish up with his folios. After
the Franco-Prussian War, Doré became a much more serious artist.
The year 1872 saw his great social commentary folio masterpiece,
London, a Pilgrimage, hailed by everyone from Vincent van Gogh to
Lord Kenneth Clark.

Doré continued to produce a steady flow of
folios in the 1870s, but they became more diverse, from a travel
folio of Spain to a historical folio of The Crusades to literary
classics of Rabelais, Ariosto, and The Ancient Mariner.

In 1882, Doré took on his only U.S.
commission ever for Poe's The Raven. Doré died in early 1883,
just as he was finishing the Raven engravings. He had just turned
51.

In the late 1860s, Doré was restless again.
During the course of his entire artistic life, he moved into a
new field about every five years. Doré's greatest disappointment
in France was the fine art establishment's refusal to accept him
as a painter. Doré admittedly had difficulties with
color
shading. Some have conjectured that he was actually color-blind.
French artists were afraid he would come to dominate their field
as he had illustration. But Doré found in England the full
artistic respect he so sought. For the last 15 years of his life,
Doré was almost more British than French.

In 1867 a gallery was opened in London to
display Doré's paintings. The Doré Gallery (New Bond Street)
was open continuously in London for 25 years and then it toured
the U.S. The British proprietors of the The Doré Gallery
commissioned him to do a large religious painting, similar to one
of his Bible engravings. That began a series of enormous
religious canvasses for which he became world-famous. They became
known as the greatest collection of religious paintings in the
world. The French would say, "But his paintings are really
just enormous illustrations," and the British would reply,
"So what?"

Doré's final vindication as a painter came
in 1896 in Chicago, long after his death. That was the
westernmost stop of the Doré Gallery. The common folks in the
midwest of the U.S. dearly loved Doré and proceeded to break
every attendance record at the Art Institute of Chicago. Daily
attendance exceeded 16,000 and on the final day, over 4,000
people came thru the turnstyles in the final HOUR !!! In eight
months 1.5 million people came to see the Doré exhibition. To
put that in perspective, the previous record for attendance at
any U.S. art museum for an entire year had been 600,000.

Doré has often been called the last of the
Romantics. In the 1870s, Doré took up watercolor landscapes,
particularly in the Alps and in Scotland.

Then in the late 1870s, he turned to
sculpture. He found the French more receptive to his sculpture
(no problems with coloring). But it was again after his death
that he was really accepted. Doré died just as he was finishing
his monument to his good friend Alexandre Dumas. No record can be
found of a single negative comment by any French art critic
concerning the Dumas monument. Many of them had felt that success
came too easily to Doré, that he had not paid his dues. Instead
Doré paid his dues after he was successful and he died a broken
man, even though millions of fan around the world adored his art.

Vincent van Gogh referred to Doré as an
"Artist of the People" because Doré took his art
directed to the masses thru his literary folios. Now all of
Doré's art is in the public domain and it is reprinted through
commercial printing all over
the world. Doré's sets of engravings are etched into the memory
of society's collective subconscious. That is his true legacy.

We
are now
retired and the Postaprint Websiteis no longer available. However this series of Reference Pages are being
left on line. We do hope you will find them to informative and helpful. They
provide details of many of the maps, books and engravings we had the pleasure of dealing in over so
many years.
A full index of all the Reference Pages will be found HERE.However, my wife does have an eBay store with
many attractive old maps & prints on offer.

This Page is provided as a REFERENCE
RESOURCE - it is NOT an Inventory.